The Lily's Tongue

Frances Maughan-Brown

Description

How do texts speak with authority? That is the question at the heart of Kierkegaard's theory and practice of "indirect communication." None of Kierkegaard's texts respond to this question more concisely and powerfully than the four discourses he wrote about the lily in the Gospel. The Lily's Tongue is a nuanced, sustained reading of these Lily Discourses. Kierkegaard takes the lilies as authoritative, rather than merely "figural" or "metaphorical." This book is a careful exploration of what Kierkegaard means by this authority.

Frances Maughan-Brown demonstrates how Kierkegaard argues that the key is in the act of reading itself—no text can have authority unless the reader grants it that authority because no text can entirely avoid figural language. Texts don't speak directly; their tongue is always the lily's tongue. What is revealed in the Lily Discourses is a groundbreaking theory of figure, which requires a renewed reading of Kierkegaard's major pseudonymous works.
Preface

The Lily’s Tongue

1. Glass Birds

2. Paper Flowers

3. The Child

4. Golden Leaves

The Cordate Tongue

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 24 septembre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438476353
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE LILY’S TONGUE
SUNY series, Literature … in Theory
David E. Johnson and Scott Michaelsen, editors
THE LILY’S TONGUE
Figure and Authority in Kierkegaard’s Lily Discourses
Frances Maughan-Brown
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2019 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Maughan-Brown, Frances, 1987– author.
Title: The lily’s tongue : figure and authority in Kierkegaard’s lily discourses / Frances Maughan-Brown.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2019] | Series: SUNY series, literature … in theory | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018052704| ISBN 9781438476339 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438476353 (ebk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813–1855. | Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813–1855—Religion. | Bible. Matthew, VI, 24–34—Criticism, interpretation, etc. | Authority in literature. | Figures of speech. | Language and languages—Philosophy. | Language and languages—Religious aspects—Christianity.
Classification: LCC B4377 .M395 2019 | DDC 198/.9—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018052704
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Joan and Cora Joan
CONTENTS
Preface
The Lily’s Tongue
1 Glass Birds
2 Paper Flowers
3 The Child
4 Golden Leaves
The Cordate Tongue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
PREFACE
Gravity in the Question of Authority
Several events have occurred since I finished writing this book, which have allowed me to see it in a different way. My home in South Africa burnt down. The place in which I wrote Paper Flowers (for the flame-like Candelabra Flower), the place which has made its way into the book so forcefully, is no longer there. The birds are not in the eves or on the posts of the veranda, not in the trees, which are not there to break the wind. Much of the surrounding land, the farms, and the town burnt in the same wildfire.
There are readers of this book who have wanted me to “cut” the “fauna and flora” from its pages in order to cleanse and strengthen the philosophical argument. But the philosophical argument does not exist without the flowers. When they burn, nothing is left. The lily’s tongue is the only tongue. That is what Kierkegaard heard in the Gospel of Matthew, in the passage about the lily and the bird. It is what he wrote four books—the Lily Discourses—about. And so, since this book is just a reading of Kierkegaard’s Lily Discourses, it is what this book is about.
Figure cannot be avoided. There is no direct communication (which makes the task of writing a preface frustrating). But this is the claim Kierkegaard makes consistently throughout the Lily Discourses. And this claim about figure requires us to change the way we think about authority . Because if communication must be indirect, listening cannot be forced. A person can be subjected to sound, but not to sense. A text can be printed in every newspaper and can flash across every screen, but a person cannot be made to read it, cannot be made to understand it, cannot be made to believe it. Kierkegaard’s discovery about the way figure works is also a discovery about the way authority works. Authority can be granted only by the reader.
Before my family home overlooking the Goukamma River and the Indian Ocean, my home in Knysna, South Africa, burnt, Donald Trump was elected president. My husband and daughter and I were living in Roslindale, in Boston. A friend who was living with us at the time went into labor when the results were announced. We heard the car drive off to the hospital in the night and thought the rest was a dream.
Trump’s election is an indication of the crisis of authority in the United States and in the rest of the world. In the midst of this crisis, Kierkegaard’s intervention is worth consideration. Before I give a prefatory indication of the place of the Lily Discourses in Kierkegaard’s oeuvre, or the place of this book in Kierkegaard scholarship, I would like to describe one of the challenges Kierkegaard made to the intellectual authorities of his own age. Kierkegaard’s challenge can tell us something about how authority works in general, but it can also tell us about a very specific problem we’re having today.
In the second of the four Lily Discourses, Kierkegaard writes a parody of the “enlightened man” who has “an understanding of reality.” This person “finds it fatuous to refer an adult person to the bird and the lily.” 1 Philosophical arguments should be stripped of fauna and flora, and they should demonstrate the benefit they have to offer. The “enlightened man” is someone who wants to take care of his family, pay his taxes, educate his children, and generally get on with life sensibly. This person, as Kierkegaard describes him, sets up a dichotomy between “meaning,” on the one hand, and “miracle,” on the other; between “demonstration,” on the one hand, and “truth,” on the other—and then chooses meaning and demonstration. That which is “beneficial,” that which helps to produce a “solution” when it is time to pay one’s fees, that is the only thing worth pursuing: the rest is for children.
Kierkegaard’s enlightened man is the father of today’s “expert,” or at least, of all of us who trust the sagacity of experts. Today we would say Kierkegaard’s enlightened man is the person who appreciates “facts”—not random facts, of course—but important, relevant facts. Facts that enable us to cure diseases and build bridges. Facts, as we might say, such as gravity.
Trump and his administration have declared their impatience with experts and their disregard for facts in several ways—and in so doing have represented a more widely held rejection of the authorities—but their invention of the term “alternative fact” was an unprecedented moment of creativity. The alternative fact presents us with a whole new category of truth, and a very unsettling one at that. Kierkegaard’s enlightened man shudders in all of us who have witnessed it being used to harm people living in the United States. But Kierkegaard, who so fearlessly denounced the “public authority” of the enlightened man, would denounce this new confusion, this strange anti-authority authoritarianism of Trump, with equal force. Between 1846 and 1851, Kierkegaard wrote the four Lily Discourses in which an alternative to the authority of the fact is worked out. That alternative can be called, here in preface, by the name of one of Kierkegaard’s more potent terms: the “footprint.”
By understanding Kierkegaard’s critique, we would be better able to understand, and to resist, the confusion of authority that Trump represents. But in order to do that, we also need to have a clearer sense of what we mean by “facts.”
Facts are sometimes referred to as “scientific facts.” This is presumably because we think of a fact as something that has been produced by science, or something that can be proven by science, something that comes from or can be checked by the scientific method. Science is therefore thought of as the authority behind the fact, the team of experts who guarantee that it is right. As this authority is questioned, however, as the voices of scientists are doubted or ignored, the concept of fact hardly changes. Our era has been called the “post-truth” era. This “post” of post-truth doesn’t go backwards; it doesn’t retreat from the idea of the almost-touchable fact. It merely adjusts who can claim such facts.
Alternative facts are neither any vaguer nor any less binding than conventional facts. The authority, which once was attributed to the scientist, and by analogy to other experts, remains. In other words, people believe in the concrete, specific, alternative fact. In the outrage of their response, enlightened people have noted the divorce between science and alternative fact, but they seem not to have noticed that this divorce is not new. The alternative fact takes advantage of the gap that has always existed between science and facts. Because on closer inspection, we can see that no one ever believed scientific facts because of the method. You don’t need to believe what you can see, after all; you don’t need to believe what has been shown.
It is a mistake to think that the scientific method produces facts, at least those facts that Kierkegaard’s enlightened man would have so appreciated: relevant, beneficial, easily communicable ones. What we mean by “facts,” the facts taught in high schools, the facts used in newspapers, the facts that now must face “alternatives,” are not scientific. But to illustrate this properly, we need an example: this one comes in the informal form of an interview granted by the Gates Foundation to NPR late in 2017. The CEO of the Gates Foundation, Sue Desmond-Hellmann, spoke on Science Friday , to Ira Flatow, the show’s host. He asked Desmond-Hellmann why she thought “that scientists must participate in the public dialogue around facts and the truth,” and she responded by saying that “science is under threat.” She continued to describe the attack science and the authority of scientists have come under in the post-truth world. Desmond-Hellman points out that this attack has happened despite what she considers a general